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The fun and frustation learning Android development

It’s been a long time since the last time I write something. Lately, I’ve been busy trying new things and didn’t get much time to spare to do new WordPress Theme. Fixing bugs and updating on Neutro is the only time I touch WodPress. Fortunately, most of the bugs has been resolved and the new feature could be implemented on the future release. About Exray, in my opinion it’s all perfect for now, no bug found so far and don’t really know what new features to add on the next release. Perhaps just leave it as it is a good policy.

Recently, Android development pique my interest. I’m an avid user of Pocket, one of the most popular read it later apps. It’s an excellent apps with lots of useful features and nice UX. It’s just the free version didn’t include offline reading, which I really needed to keep my Internet quota in check. I began to look for alternative and found Wallabag, a self hostable application for saving web pages. It’s a promising opensource project, Unfortunately it’s still not yet ready and need a lot of ironing on the back end side to fix the bugs and add other missing features. Luckily, I found WordPress will be implementing REST api to the core, which is a good opportunity for me to learn Android development and use WordPress as a platform to create my own read it later app.

The fun and frustation

I always love trying new tech, and Android development is a long overdue task I keep procrastinate to learn. Compared to Web development and WordPress, it’s a bit more complicated to jump start and start making cool apps like the one on Play Store. There are lot of jargon that need to be understood like Activity, Fragment, Intent, Bundle, Extra, etc. I recommend Android Development Starter Tutorials by Vogella for your references, aside for the official Android developer resources. It has extensive collection of tutorial, code and example apps to jump start your first Android app. It feels really nice when you finally made your first hello world app.

The Apps life cycle is quite complicated for the first time developer. You have to read the documentation to anticipate the scenario for each life cycle in order for you apps to run correctly. Until now, I’m still having some trouble to correctly utilize for each and every life cycle. Well, so long there are no bugs found, I just keep going and code however I want. Android Studio is a really nice IDE featured wise. Unfortunately, some times some weird bug appear out of nowhere and made me pull my hair. Most of the time, invalidating cache and restart will do the trick. On the other time, you have to delete .gradle directory to be able to compile and run your code.

Despite of the bugs, the IntelliJ based IDE is quite powerful. I really like the search anywhere with double press on Shift button, very similar with Sublime Text quick file finder. The dark color scheme option is really good on the eye, which is added as options on the IDE settings. I hope Android Studio will be out of Beta soon and get the major release. Anyway, it’s been kinda long for a rant. I hope this read it later app project could be realized soon.

A WordPress fanboi and hobbyist from Indonesia. I do not make my living from WordPress, and just doing it for hobby on spare times. If you need something and I have time, let’s talk and shoot me email here septianahmad[at]naisinpo[dot]com. or Poke @fujianto on Twitter.